Upon the pedestals rest pot metal, a croquet ball, a bowl, copper tubing, a gourd and some shrink-wrap. The wall works are made of Ultracal and ringed with rubber hose, a jump rope and plastic. The pedestals are built of pine, birch, maple; some finished with altered wallpaper patterns, shellac and acrylic paint.

“Jason, you might consider combining the sections of the thin floor lamps to make one of two endless columns.”

The objects upon each pedestal are found in thrift and second-hand stores. The motley collection is bought by the artist’s father-in law and sporadically boxed and sent to Losh. He uses these items and constructs them into particular compositions, sequences and
arrangements.

“You should consider that sculpture is elusive. It presents too many faces at once.”

The surface of each component is carved with a distinct history. Cracks, dents and paint abrasions that have accrued over decades distinguish their weathered surfaces. The wall sculptures are laced with ropes and etched with lines that record the artist’s hand.

“Consider that presentness is grace.”

The surfaces of Losh’s pedestals are either laid bare or laid with William Morris wallpaper patterns. They are essential objects that contain the elegant, gestural movement of each piece through consummating their raw presence.

“Jason, simplicity is complexity resolved.”

Jason Bailer Losh’s works are composed of everyday materials repurposed into wholly new objects. They feel visible and familiar, yet relate outside of their tactility and functionality. Through the artist’s hand, common, commercial and domestic objects are exposed of their sculptural, formal and physical dimensions.

The exhibition opens February 27th and is on view until April 4th. An opening reception will be held Friday, February 27th from 7-9PM.

Jason Bailer Losh (b. 1977, Iowa) received his MFA from School of Visual Arts. Losh’s work has been recently exhibited at several public and private institutions including The Museum of Love and Devotion, at Fairview Museum of Art and History in Fairview, Utah; the Gala at Greystone for LAXART, Los Angeles; and Rockaway!, an exhibition organized by Klaus Biesenbach at PS1/Rockaway Surf Club, NY. Losh has also participated in Soft Target, a group exhibition curated by Phil Chang and Matthew Porter at M+B Gallery, Los Angeles; and Building Materials, a group show curated by Lucas Blalock at Control Room, Los Angeles; and a group exhibition at CANADA, NY. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

George Billis Gallery is pleased to present the gallery’s third solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Anne Seidman. The exhibition features the artist’s most recent body of work and continues through February 21st.

Seidman writes of her work: “These new works I use modular units of blocks, triangulated shapes and line to construct an evolving organic form. The form is built one unit at a time while I simultaneously keep my eye on the whole.

In some of the works I use color pencil and tape with text. Each time I draw or place a unit I do so with an unblinking consideration for how it will associate with pieces already firmly planted. The chunks of cut and pieced together type are used to suggest energy, an underlying support and the sound of babble.

During the process of building the form a single unit might be nudged up, then over and sometimes added to an already exaggerated and stretched out column. Other times a unit that is placed too far out, practically teetering, appears to be testing gravity and its consequence. Ultimately all forms are steadied by an unknown balance elsewhere in the plane.

A sense of consciousness and a sense of place within forms and between their edges is made by allowing an unwilled execution to coexist with restrained judgment. Contiguous form and unexpected color and relationships are some of the recurring themes that create abstract narratives in the work.

The work is constructed in a single plane without depth. Some see dimension in the work but that is not my intention. At times the work might read as landscape or figure but it is intended to describe only itself.”

Karen Woods From Here

Feb 21 - Apr 4, 2015

Southern California's freeways and suburban roads as seen through the framework of a windshield make up new works by painter Karen Woods.

George Billis Gallery is pleased to present the gallery’s second solo exhibition of paintings by Karen Woods. The exhibition features the artist’s most recent body of work and continues through February 21st.

Woods writes of her work: "I paint in the realist tradition as a way to communicate the sublime in the ordinary. For several years now the radiance of the road has been the overt subject of my work.

“From Here” is about the particular view as a passenger of the many lanes of traffic on southern California’s highways and suburban streets. The wet roads and rain-soaked windshields—so welcome in this season of drought—both diffuse and highlight this radiance.

I seek to capture the sense of intimacy inside a car, the state of floating and suspension at high speeds, the sense of isolation and community between myself and fellow commuters, the steady stream of traffic and its resemblance to natural phenomena.”

Glike Gallery is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition with Diane Christiansen from Chicago and Seung Huh from NYC. This is the first time these artists have exhibited with the gallery. Both artist use nuanced and bold linear abstractions to define the figure in sometimes exaggerated and humorous ways. Diane Christensen paints oil in worked-over plaster supports and Seung Huh paints oil aggressively and confidently onto canvas. An opening reception will be held on February 27th from 7- 11pm.

Klowden Mann is very pleased to present Serenade, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Christine Frerichs. The exhibition is Frerichs’ second with the gallery, and continues her focus on memory, relationships and the construction of personal identity, as expressed through abstract painting. The exhibition centers around a series of paired canvases layered with thick oil paint, acrylic and wax, using subtle, bold, light and dark colors, and curving textured lines which ripple across each of their surfaces. These formal qualities describe an abstracted representation of two figures, and the visceral experience of different landscapes as they relate to the physical and emotional self. The exhibition will be on view from March 7th through April 11th, 2015, and will also feature several of Frerichs’ smaller individual 8.5 by 11 inch works in the gallery project room. The gallery will hold an opening reception on Saturday, March 7th from 6 to 8pm, and an artist talk on Saturday March 21st, at 4pm.

Christine Frerichs (b. 1979, Los Angeles) has been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions at venues including ACME, CB1 Gallery, Young Art (Los Angeles, CA), Vincent Price Museum (Monterey Park, CA), Sweeney Art Gallery (Riverside, CA), Duchess Presents (Chicago, IL), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ), and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (Dublin, Ireland), and in art fairs with Klowden Mann in New York, Houston and Miami. Solo exhibitions of her work include Klowden Mann and Kaycee Olsen Gallery in Los Angeles, and a solo presentation at VOLTA NY in New York. Frerichs’ work has been reviewed by ArtForum, The Los Angeles Times, and published in New American Paintings, as well as being featured by Two Coats of Paint, Notes on Looking, and many others. She received her B.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 2002 and her M.F.A. from the University of California, Riverside in 2009. Frerichs is currently adjunct faculty at Otis College of Art and Design, East Los Angeles College, and Long Beach City College.

Kopeikin Gallery is pleased to announce our first exhibition with artist Matthew Swarts called “Processing: Beth and the Alternatives.” These two series are abstract portraits of relationships, where the artist’s original photographs are obscured with images gleaned from the Internet—optical illusions, children’s illustrations, architectural papers, etc. Overlaying these patterns on the original photos results in personal imagery with a strange, psychedelic melancholy. The results are trippy, surreal, sometimes confusing and always mesmerizing. They are portraits that describe the emotions that arise both during and after a significant breakup. The exhibition opens on Saturday March 7th with a reception for the artist from six to eight and runs through April 18th. It is free and open to the public.
“The fun part is getting lost along the way, abandoning whatever strategy I thought was going to work, and just allowing some mistake and randomness to generate new ideas.” – Matthew Swarts

The cliché that time heals all wounds might be true, but, for Matthew Swarts, after a painful end to a long-term relationship, the passing of time only created a sense of confused detachment, especially when looking at his old photographs.
So Swarts decided to use those images to process the end of the relationship, creating his series “Beth.” In Beth, slowly erasing his ex-girlfriend is a metaphor for loss, but it’s also about ownership. The original portraits were a collaborative process. Now that she’s gone, he doesn’t feel the same ownership and is remaking the photographs.

While working on “Beth,” Swarts started a new relationship and so began a second series, “The Alternatives.” In The Alternatives, the blurred, obscured images are a metaphor for the uncertainty and complexity of forging a new relationship. Although emotions are strong at the dawn of a new romance, there are nagging questions about whether things will work out.

Both use images he has collected online for more than a decade—including optical illusions, children’s illustrations, maps, and even school papers. Swarts mixed them up to create unique patterns and then layeres those patterns over the collection of images from his present and everyday life.
Matthew Swarts’ work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, SLATE, FLAK photo, Conscientious Photography Magazine, Doubletake Magazine, Contact Sheet, Afterimage, Fotophile, In the Loupe, and

La Pêche is excited to announce the upcoming exhibition, RISK and REWARD, works by Andreis Mikael Costa. In the tradition of scrapbooking Costa uses collected images to record a moment in time. These visual representations comprised of found images explore themes of sex, consumerism, mortality, and pop culture iconography.

This new body of work is presented as a series of four photo-reliefs. Utilizing large-scale photographic images mounted on board, the works are assembled collage style directly to the wall of the gallery. At the core of each of these works is varying portrayals of sex. In the exhibitions namesake Risk and Reward (see above) lies a couple in the throws of passion, it might even be love given the Romance Novel-esque quality of the lovers. The depiction is less than ideal for the couples at the center of Jaws of the Blonde Beast and Take a Bite and See Says the Snake in the Tree where fear, desperateness, and vulgarity are present. Other imagery, lurking in the background and at instances violating foreground, completes Costa’s biographical renderings. This imagery juxtaposed with the sexualized duos is not meant to be dichotomous; instead it develops the singular narratives within each work. The visually differing Kick Me is a collage of many enticing pairs of legs presenting the viewer with pure seduction.

Andreis Mikael Costa has shown in New York, Los Angeles, and Portland, OR. Notably in 2012 Costa was invited to participate in the premiere exhibition of the SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, and then again in 2013. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.

In addition there will be available a limited edition of signed Giclée print multiples of the works featured in Risk and Reward.

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by New York artist, Carolyn Marks Blackwood. On the Edge is the artist's first solo show with the gallery.

“Carolyn Marks Blackwood is a modern day artist for whom the Hudson River is also an unfailing muse. Consumed by her daily photographic study of the water over which her studio is perched—as well as the sky that hovers above it—Blackwood’s images are not the romantic vistas of her predecessors, but almost their opposite: focused close-ups that capture the river’s power through the drama of detail. Instead of coalescing several scenes into one, her photographs are a celebration of the variation a single geographic location can elicit through the constantly changing conditions of wind, light, day, night, temperature and tide.”

—Excerpt from the essay Elements of Place by Carol Diehl

Coaxing painterly expression from a documentary device, Blackwood’s photographs reframe segments of air, ice and water into vivid color fields, geometric abstractions and flattened motifs. By removing perspective and context, her unmodified images seize ephemeral moments within everyday occurrences and heighten them into foreign, unfamiliar pictures.

A screenwriter and producer, Blackwood is a principal partner of Magnolia Mae Films. Among the films produced by Magnolia Mae are The Duchess (2008), The Invisible Woman (2013) and Philomena (2013). Blackwood began exhibiting her photography in the last ten years.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated brochure with an essay by Barbara Rose. For additional information or visual material, please contact the gallery at (310) 559-5700 or by email at gallery@vonlintel.com.

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by New York artist, Catherine Howe. Supreme Fiction is the artist's third solo show with the gallery.

The unrestrained brushwork in Howe’s anarchic paintings inject raw emotion into docile subject matter, like flowers in a vase. By using the historical idiom of still-life as the anchor, Howe mashes the heroics of action-painting with the humility of vanitas tableaux.

Rather than focus on intimate observation, Howe operates on memory and feeling to invest mutable mediums with immense physicality. Pushing buckets of clear gloss over titanium molding paste, nascent forms become visible only after a dusting of carborundum grit (traditionally used to smooth lithography stone) and a final sweep of a broom. A self-proclaimed materials fiend, Howe also experiments with mica interference pigment suspended in acrylic resin to lend a refractive, iridescence to the canvas ground.

While the works explode with movement and texture, Howe restricts herself with respect to color. A stark palette emphasizes the expressive, psychological gestures seemingly unleashed during manic creative outputs. Howe qualifies the entire process as one of alchemy. As Michéle C. Cone writes in a recent catalogue essay, “Maybe, Howe’s evocative paintings are not about still life per se, but about the naming of things transposed into paint, and the magical interaction between medium, memory and perception.”

Born in Western New York in 1959, Howe received an MFA from SUNY Buffalo in 1983. The many publications that have reviewed her work include Art in America, Artforum, Art Critical, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. Howe has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe for over twenty years, including shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, MoMA PS 1 in New York, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated brochure with an essay by David Ebony. For additional information or visual material, please contact the gallery at (310) 559-5700 or by email at gallery@vonlintel.com.